Snow Day Mess Fun!

I was excited Thursday morning to wake up to find that we had snow on the ground and that it was also still snowing. I was even more excited to know that it was one of my days off and I didn't have to worry about whether or not the roads were safe to drive on.

Caleb and I spent most of the day inside but we did take a few minutes late in the afternoon to bundle up and play in the snow. He enjoyed using his little shovel to dig in the snow and had fun making snow angels. The first thing he asked for when we got outside was for an icicle.

After lazing around the first part of the morning I decided it was time to turn off the tv and get out some paints. Caleb loves playing with paint and this day was no different. I asked him if he wanted to use a paint brush or if he wanted to use some leftover spaghetti noodles that we had from the night before as a paint brush. (this was something we did at one of our Mommy and Me outings). He had a lot of fun squishing the paint and noodles in his hands.

I told him to show me his hands and told him he looked like one of the men off of the Blue Man Group (he LOVES watching YouTube videos of the Blue Man Group on the computer). He immediately wanted to know how he could make his head blue and while I had my back turned proceeded to begin to run his hand in his hair, luckily I caught him doing this before there was too much paint on his head. I'm glad I decided to take his shirt off of him because he ended up with a bit of paint on him. The clean up however was easy as I just put him in the shower for the 2nd shower that morning.

Voila! The final masterpiece.

For our next craft project we proceeded to make colored ice stepping stones. I found this idea off of a link on The Crafty Crow. Caleb did a really good job pouring the water without any help and only got a little bit on the cookie sheet that we were using.

We decided to use paint vs. food coloring so that the color would stand out more.

He chose the colors himself and while stirring the pink told me "that's like Elyn's birthday party" :-)

After the colors were all mixed up we put them outside to let them freeze. I explained to him that they would have to stay out all night and that in the morning we would go out to check on them to see if they had changed to ice.

Friday morning we went outside and took our colored ice out of the bowls and put them in the snow.

Caleb got his pants a little wet while we were doing this so I had him take off his pants and shoes and afterwards went out to take a picture of our colored ice stepping stones. When I returned inside I found this....... :-)

He reminds me of cousin Eddie off of Christmas Vacation. Caleb insisted on going outside in his new outfit. Needless to say he didn't stay out too long before he told me he was cold.

Words of Advice

The other day I went to go potty and from the other room I hear Caleb say "Mommy, don't pee pee on your hands". Uh.....pretty sure I wasn't planning on it but I appreciate the reminder :-).

Who Says Boys Don't Like a Little Bling

A couple weeks ago we took Caleb to the mall to see Santa Claus. On our way out we went through Dillard's where Caleb wanted to ride the escalator upstairs. As we were looking around Caleb spotted a pair of shoes that he insisted on trying on and I'm not really sure how but he instantly knew they lit up and nothing would do until he tried them on. I told him to take them over to his Daddy to try on :-).....

These things were blinged out to the max and lit up and sparkled all over the place and I'm sure that Caleb would have been very happy to have taken them home. The sales lady was very nice to let him play around and try them on (no, we didn't not ask her to go get his size we just tried on the display).

Janson

Yesterday was a sad day at the Winberry house as we lost our grey cat Janson. While there are a few of you that didn't know we even had a cat there are others that didn't realize we actually had two as Janson was rarely ever seen by others outside of our immediate family. Poor little guy definitely was the living definition of a scaredy cat and even though he was a part of our family for 10 years he never really warmed up to anyone except David.

We are so sad for our loss but in some ways realize it is a blessing to him as he has not been happy for some time and we were often afraid that Jordan, our tortoise colored cat, would go before him and leave him utterly and totally lost by himself.

It's very sad to think that Jordan is now the last of the 5 original, yes 5, cats that we had living with us at one time. I guess I should go back and give a little history........

In October of 2000 David's sister and her family were in town visiting us at our old house in Lowell. The kids discovered 4 kittens in one of the empty lots around our house. It appeared that they had either been abandoned by their mother or dumped off by their owner. We decided to take them in with the understanding that we would find homes for them as we did not have any intentions of keeping all of them. However, if I'm being absolutely honest we didn't try very hard and days turned into weeks, week into months and we still had them. David and I had always wanted a grey cat so something possessed us to go to the pound where we crazily decided when you have 4 cats what really is one more and this is when we made the decision to bring home a 6 week old grey kitty to join our already large heard of cats.

From the get go Janson was always a little different and while he liked our other cats well enough he was just always very scared and something was always not quite right about him. I have seriously never seen an animal so skittish. He was more of our night crawler as he didn't really come out much during the day but seemed to enjoy being out at night.

After a few months we lost Cali, our calico kitty, to a car accident; Cana, our black and white cat, was killed right as we were moving out of David's parents house into the house we are in today (we stayed with them for a while as our house in Lowell sold earlier than expected and our new house wasn't finished yet) and this left us with Jasper, our all black cat, Janson and Jordan.

One day after only being in our house for a few weeks we couldn't find Jasper so David decided to go across the street to see if our neighbors had seen him and if he might have accidentally wandered over to their house and gotten locked into their garage. David said as soon as he asked if they had seen our cat our neighbor immediately burst into tears and her husband had to come to the door to let David know she had accidentally ran over him (they didn't realize it was our cat). She later came to the house bringing flowers and apologizing through teary eyes which was so sweet and I felt just as bad for her as I did for ourselves as I know she felt horrible and this was definitely not the way either families had planned on meeting one another.

I'm sure that Jordan will be fine as she has always had a bit of spunk to her even though she was the runt of the group. Even though we didn't see Janson very much as he typically stayed out of sight I'm actually more sad than I thought I would be and hate to know that he is not out hiding in our garage some place. While he was always very scared of us he still always let us know in his own awkward way that he liked us and he will be missed.

The Crew

Cali & Janson
Cana

Janson & Jasper

Jordan
Janson

Baby It's Cold......Inside?

While some of you are wishing for a white Christmas with lots of fun billowy white snow our household is praying that the temperatures stays in the upper digits. Yesterday I started the first day of my days off until the new year so luckily I was home to discover that our downstairs heater was not working properly and didn't seem to want to kick on. At one point the display on the thermostat went blank and wouldn't even show anything and then randomly came back on. Needless to say we called someone to come take a look at it as we are hosting Christmas at our house.

While we hoped for the best the repair man told us that the blower on our downstairs heating/air unit had gone out and unfortunately they do not keep the part in stock and......wait for it..........the part will not be in until MONDAY!

The other nice piece of news was finding out the cost of a new blower, let's just say I'm very, very thankful that we took to heart the things we learned in our Financial Peace classes and that we have an emergency fund.

We are very thankful that our upstairs unit is still working but are going to have to have them come take another look at it because the pilot light keeps going out. We went and purchased a couple of space heaters, are bundling on the layers, trying to keep a positive attitude and are creating some crazy memories. So if you are reading this and are coming to our house for Christmas you better bundle up :-)